Cisco, Comsol and NIL have announced an agreement to help accelerate the adoption of IoT-enabled devices and networks with applications such as ‘intelligent farming’ and Smart City technologies.
With the addition of Cisco gateways utilizing LoRa® technology, Comsol will be able to accelerate the build out of their Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) and offer long-distance wireless connectivity for battery-powered IoT devices.
Cisco’s LoRaWAN™-compliant solution connects IoT devices and sensors across cities or rural areas nationally – a first-of-its-kind in Africa – at low cost and with low power consumption, allowing battery operated sensors to last as long as 10 years. The architecture provides a standards-based IoT network at scale, enabling a host of business models for the LoRaWAN ecosystem without the need for significant investment.
“The Cisco gateway architecture increases the resilience and security of our LoRa network. As we see rapid adoption of IoT services globally, security and uptime are becoming more critical. The partnership allows us to offer our clients a best of breed architecture backed by Cisco with support from NIL,” says Greg Montjoie, IoT COO at Comsol.
The network also provides a comprehensive geolocation and tracking solution, offering network-based location capabilities enabled by Cisco LoRaWAN network gateways and infrastructure. IoT services and applications that will benefit from this technology include asset tracking, smart parking, smart lighting, waste management, water and gas metering, irrigation management, intelligent buildings and many other uses.
“The LoRa ecosystem is rapidly expanding and evolving. Therefore, from a security perspective, it is critical that resilience is built in so that updates are quickly pushed to the network,” adds Clayton Naidoo, Acting General Manager – Cisco South Africa.
According to SNS research, by 2025, almost half of Internet of Things Machine to Machine (M2M) wide-area connections will make use of LPWAN technologies. These offer ease of connection and simple backend infrastructure, wide coverage, low power consumption, and low cost. Cisco is a founding board member of the LoRa Alliance formed in January, 2015, with a goal to standardise LPWANs and stimulate the growth of Internet of Things applications.
